TeachingBase
What Kind of Mind?
Developed by the University of St Andrews, in conjunction with the Department of Philosophy and the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, the ‘What Kind of Mind?’ project provides teaching resources to introduce pupils to research ideas about animal minds. Over the course of the program, many questions will be explored, including:
What is a mind? What constitutes intelligence? What is evolution? Why is discussion about animal minds important? How do philosophy and psychology impact us? How do we find out about other minds? How should experiments be controlled? How do we compare to our ancestors? How can we find out about other minds? What is language? Why do we play? What is curiosity? How do researchers come up with a hypothesis?
About the resources
The lesson program is aimed at pupils aged approximately 8-12 (in Scotland – P5-P7).
The resources include lesson plans, presentations, detailed teacher notes, class activities and associated materials. The resources are listed to download under the individual lessons, but for ease, the whole course can be downloaded in the Quick Download page, as well as printable student workbooks.
The aspects of the Scottish Curriculum which are used in the lesson are shown by SCN-numbers, listed in the skills section.
Lesson resources
The ‘What Kind of Mind?’ project and the associated resources have been produced by
the University of St Andrews, in conjunction with the Department of Philosophy and the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, using funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. For more information or contact details, visit their contact page.
- Teaching material type Full lesson plan, Lesson collection
- Subject Areas Biology, Ethics, Human Evolution, Interdisciplinary, Philosophy, Social-Emotional Learning, STEM
- Suitable Grade Levels 6-8
- Content Anchors Ancient Ancestors, Child development, Cross-species, Cultural diversity, Our Mind
- Licensing unknown
